Obama destroys retirement for 20,000 auto industry workers

In yet another example of Obama administration corruption, malfeasance and meddling, Human Events and Daily Caller are reporting:

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions. …

Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

This may not be shocking to those of us who eyes are open to the undercover games played by the Obama administration when they took over GM and Chrysler: illegal overrides of bankruptcy law as they stole from bondholders to save the unions; political meddling in the dealership closure process; Payoffs to unions that looked suspiciously like patronage and payback. And so it went. Taxpayers are still on the hook to the tune of $35 billion.

Obama, it is reported, is headed off to Colorado, seeking to gin up political advantage from the pork, patronage and pandering of wind energy credits. Obama offers a corrupt, economically dysfunctional model of Government industrial favoritism, the kind favored by fascists and 3rd world potentates from Juan Peron to Hugo Chavez. What Obama is most proud of – his Governmental meddling that helps favored rent-seeking supplicants at the expense of honest businesses and taxpaying workers – is what he should be most ashamed of.

What is truly mind-boggling is the utter lack of forced accountability for Obama’s corrupt and in some cases illegal meddling. Where’s the outrage? Where are the 30 second ads? Where’s the mainstream media? Where is the Romney campaign? There are acts of journalistic and campaign malpractice involved in the failure to connect the dots. Those dots should be connected: From Obama’s ideology, to his actions, to our lousy flat-lined economy, to the pain and suffering of millions in this Obama Depression.

What a contrast with the recent ad against Romney. Bain worked hard and diligently to save GST Steel from the winds of international competition in a tough industry. It didnt help them that unions engaged in strikes when GST attempted to make changes to improve competitiveness. While Bain was trying to work on a bond sale to strengthen GST the union went on strike derailing the bond effort. Somehow Romney is to blame for an ex-worker’s wife’s death 5 years after he stopped working at GST, as if Bain owed him employment and healthcare for life no matter if the company went under.

As one board commenter put it on these articles:

So we are supposed to cry for these 750 workers that Bain tried to keep working for 6 years in an attempt to turn the business around. Meanwhile we find out that 20,000 workers from Delphi got hosed by this Administration with the stroke of a pen.

Obama administration claims they weren’t involved with these Delphi workers who got screwed out of pensions:

Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan.

The emails contradict those claims. But even without those emails, the decision to wipe away 20,000 pensions, at a time when Obama was using billions in taxpayer funding to salvage pensions for a subset of workers (UAW workers) in the very same industry, stinks on a number of levels. Obama should be held accountable. By the standard of the anti-Romney ad, Obama probably is on the hook for many high blood pressure cases, a few heart attacks, cancer cases, and slip-and-fall accidents too.